Why It's Taking Off: A sleek enterprise application that boosts productivity and collaboration in the office.

Conference calls as we know it could become a thing of the past thanks to one startup.

Unison, an enterprise software company, launched a social networking tool for businesses earlier this year which lets employees communicate through virtual rooms organized around specific projects or teams to help boost collaboration and productivity. The service offers options to share documents and voice notes, chat with coworkers using the "@" symbol like on Twitter and view updates in real-time.

This week, the company further differentiated itself from competitors in the space like Yammer and Campfire by expanding on its concept of virtual rooms with new features that mimic the immediacy of the physical office.

Now, users can easily visualize which employees are active in each room, effectively allowing managers and workers to see who is working on what at any moment. Unison has also made its virtual rooms more dynamic with rich communication tools, the most notable of which is its audio chat capability. Rather than go through the hassle of scheduling conference calls and setting up dial-in codes, Unison users can simply click the mic logo at the top corner of the screen and instantly be in a conference call with everyone in the room.

The social enterprise space is becoming increasingly competitive and lucrative, most notably with Microsoft's acquisition of Yammer for $1.2 billion in June. However, Unison's CEO Manlio Carrelli argues that the enterprise tools so far have been flawed.

"We are taking a lot of the principles that we love about Facebook and Twitter, but we are not just transferring them blindly," Carrelli said. "I feel like that's what the first generation of these tools did. We made them work at work."

The company's goal, Carrelli says, isn't just to improve on conference calls, but also to reduce the need to rely on tools like e-mail as much in the office. "E-mail is awful. You spend all day digging, searching, filing, not sure if the right peple are cc-ed," he said. "Conference calls are terrible too. That got the company thinking about what's missing in this space."

With Unison, businesses can set up a private social network for their employees in less than five minutes. Unison is available for free on Mac, Windows and iOS devices.

Unison is privately funded and makes revenue by offering a premium model that gives business owners more control over content shared through the service.

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